On October 2, I sat in the audience of the first of six public events in what appears to be MIT’s semester of climate change. Introducing the great and good of climate science, MIT president Rafael Reif made a comment that struck me. To paraphrase, he argued (or at...
Today is World AIDS Day, an annual day of remembrance and reflection on the global AIDS crisis held since 1988. Overshadowed this year by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, we should keep in mind...
The Ebola crisis isn't over. In the absence of new infections in the United States, Americans have moved on to other preoccupations (Ferguson anyone?), but the problem hasn't gone away even if...
In May of 2014, the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) first considered the issue of banning lethal autonomous weapons. Before the start of the informal expert meetings, Article...
Good mornin' ducks... Here's some linkage you might want to read (on stuff other than the NSA)... The IMF admitted to violating its own rules to bailout Greece and that the austerity program which accompanied the bailout did not restore market confidence. The housing bubble in America is back with a vengeance as bidding wars are heating up in the major urban markets. I think we know where this story goes next... But wait, where is this cold hard cash coming from? At least some of it is from China. The US imprisons 430,000 people each year on immigration charges (with several hundred kept...
Comet vs. Sun. Letting go of Mandela (via). Putting the DoD civilian workforce in perspective. Chinese grand strategy. Music, social movements, the body, and emotions. Some NSA stuff: Drezner, Levinson-Waldman, Lemieux. And: How economists aren't physicians. Adversity and affinity in MMORPGs.
Well, sort of. I've been getting a surprising number of emails asking for new podcasts. This semester was a killer, and no one else on the team wants to spearhead the effort. I hope to do some more before all hades breaks loose next academic year. But for now, I should note that my series over at New Books in Science Fiction & Fantasy has reemerged from its own hiatus -- and with a cross-over podcast! In it, I interview USC's Patrick James about his and Abigail E. Ruane's book, The International Relations of Middle-Earth: Learning from the Lord of the Rings. Well, what are you waiting...
The Center for a New American Security released a report yesterday entitled “The Seven Deadly Sins of Defense Spending.”[1] In it, they lay out some very basic (but very fundamental) ways that the DoD can cut costs but “preserve a strong and highly capable U.S. military.” Many of the suggested cuts seem like something you would see Dunder Mifflin being advised to do: reduce redundancy in IT management, cut pay allowances, increase pharmaceutical cost sharing, etc. And, perhaps that’s the beauty of the plan: reduce normal day-to-day business expenses in such a way that it allows the DoD to...
In the vein of recent graduations everywhere and the exams students had to take to get there, and thinking there is now ample evidence out there to get closer to winding up a debate that has raged in both policy and academic circles, let's keep in succinct: "Fukuyama was right. Huntington was wrong. Discuss"I said it was succinct!
The PRISM slides: two nice touches you may have missed (Someone put some real thought into presentation -- this is not your grandparents' NSC-68): Top secret, code word, art work. There's a special seal for "Special Source Operations" that has an eagle lifting a bundled globe -- very impressive; and, Great product placement -- special advertising in a top secret document. The slides prominently feature the companies' trademarked logos in the header. But, I wonder if this drew NSA analysts to the products or away from them? I'd like to see the market research on this one. Steve Walt asks...
Do not click if one has not read the third book of Game of Thrones or did not see the most recent episode, as spoilers dwell within: Ah, any deployment of Princess Bride is, well, magical, but, in this case, given the over-reactions on the internet Sunday night and Monday morning, this is just about perfect. I am just waiting for folks to play the Rains of Castamere at their wedding.
Having been newly promoted to permanent contributor, I'm delighted to join the esteemed Duck blogging crew (pictured above) on a more long-term basis. I'm looking forward to more lengthy substantive blog posts beyond the Thursday updates. I feel like I've been trapped in reviewer hell for weeks, just as it looked like I was clearing my inbox of book and article reviews, I kept getting another one in and the pieces always looked vaguely interesting. Taking note of Dan Nexon's recent post about the difficulty journals have in getting reviews (let alone quality ones), I determined that I had to...